Name of the group that should own the file/directory, as would be fed to chown.

mode

string

The permissions the resulting file or directory should have.

For those used to /usr/bin/chmod remember that modes are actually octal numbers. You must either add a leading zero so that Ansible's YAML parser knows it is an octal number (like 0644 or 01777) or quote it (like '644' or '1777') so Ansible receives a string and can do its own conversion from string into number.

Giving Ansible a number without following one of these rules will end up with a decimal number which will have unexpected results.

As of Ansible 1.8, the mode may be specified as a symbolic mode (for example, u+rwx or u=rw,g=r,o=r).

As of Ansible 2.6, the mode may also be the special string preserve.

When set to preserve the file will be given the same permissions as the source file.

others

string

All arguments accepted by the file module also work here.

owner

string

Name of the user that should own the file/directory, as would be fed to chown.

path

path
/ required

The file to modify.

Before Ansible 2.3 this option was only usable as dest, destfile and name.

Uses MULTILINE mode, which means ^ and $ match the beginning and end of the file, as well as the beginning and end respectively of each line of the file.

Does not use DOTALL, which means the . special character matches any character except newlines. A common mistake is to assume that a negated character set like [^#] will also not match newlines.

In order to exclude newlines, they must be added to the set like [^#\n].

Note that, as of Ansible 2.0, short form tasks should have any escape sequences backslash-escaped in order to prevent them being parsed as string literal escapes. See the examples.

replace

string

The string to replace regexp matches.

May contain backreferences that will get expanded with the regexp capture groups if the regexp matches.

If not set, matches are removed entirely.

selevel

string

Default:

s0

The level part of the SELinux file context.

This is the MLS/MCS attribute, sometimes known as the range.

When set to _default, it will use the level portion of the policy if available.

serole

string

The role part of the SELinux file context.

When set to _default, it will use the role portion of the policy if available.

setype

string

The type part of the SELinux file context.

When set to _default, it will use the type portion of the policy if available.

seuser

string

The user part of the SELinux file context.

By default it uses the system policy, where applicable.

When set to _default, it will use the user portion of the policy if available.

unsafe_writes

boolean

added in 2.2

Choices:

no ←

yes

Influence when to use atomic operation to prevent data corruption or inconsistent reads from the target file.

By default this module uses atomic operations to prevent data corruption or inconsistent reads from the target files, but sometimes systems are configured or just broken in ways that prevent this. One example is docker mounted files, which cannot be updated atomically from inside the container and can only be written in an unsafe manner.

This option allows Ansible to fall back to unsafe methods of updating files when atomic operations fail (however, it doesn't force Ansible to perform unsafe writes).

IMPORTANT! Unsafe writes are subject to race conditions and can lead to data corruption.

validate

string

The validation command to run before copying into place.

The path to the file to validate is passed in via '%s' which must be present as in the examples below.

The command is passed securely so shell features like expansion and pipes will not work.

# Before Ansible 2.3, option 'dest', 'destfile' or 'name' was used instead of 'path'-replace:path:/etc/hostsregexp:'(\s+)old\.host\.name(\s+.*)?$'replace:'\1new.host.name\2'backup:yes-name:Replace after the expression till the end of the file (requires Ansible >= 2.4)replace:path:/etc/hostsregexp:'(\s+)old\.host\.name(\s+.*)?$'replace:'\1new.host.name\2'after:Start after line.*backup:yes-name:Replace before the expression till the begin of the file (requires Ansible >= 2.4)replace:path:/etc/hostsregexp:'(\s+)old\.host\.name(\s+.*)?$'replace:'\1new.host.name\2'before:'Startbeforeline.*'backup:yes-name:Replace between the expressions (requires Ansible >= 2.4)replace:path:/etc/hostsregexp:'(\s+)old\.host\.name(\s+.*)?$'replace:'\1new.host.name\2'after:'Startafterline.*'before:'Startbeforeline.*'backup:yes-replace:path:/home/jdoe/.ssh/known_hostsregexp:'^old\.host\.name[^\n]*\n'owner:jdoegroup:jdoemode:'0644'-replace:path:/etc/apache/portsregexp:'^(NameVirtualHost|Listen)\s+80\s*$'replace:'\1127.0.0.1:8080'validate:'/usr/sbin/apache2ctl-f%s-t'-name:Short form task (in ansible 2+) necessitates backslash-escaped sequencesreplace:dest=/etc/hosts regexp='\\b(localhost)(\\d*)\\b' replace='\\1\\2.localdomain\\2 \\1\\2'-name:Long form task does notreplace:dest:/etc/hostsregexp:'\b(localhost)(\d*)\b'replace:'\1\2.localdomain\2\1\2'